Yes - Have same problem/shape after argument with jetty - jetty won !
Hard to fix in situ,as do not want to crease tube + not the place to use heat .
Difficult to dismantle,as all part of bow fitting/forestay.
Annoying as in line of sight .

Yes - imagine having to rebuild Bow !

So good to get back on my NS 38 today after the trailer sailer. Really only went down because I had a diver clean the bottom but wanted to put the safety and wet weather gear back on that I took with me to the Whitsundays.

Boat seems enormous of course but more than that everything underfoot seems like walking on a concrete slab with absolutely no flex and the nice solid sound on deck and below. Forgot to bring the toolkit bags back on board in my haste so nothing really to do.

Absolutely no water anywhere, no musty smells or even bird poo outside :-).

Beautiful day today although can't stay for a sail unfortunately.

BeamReach said..
Yes, you can not replicate the strength and solidness of a keel yacht. My mate, who is not a sailer regularly says a trailer sailer would be a lot less maintenance.
Plus a keel boat can be an offshore cruiser and not with a trailer sailer, unless you own a Imexus 28 and do the real hard getting there, by road.
Cheers

Yes everything is disproportionately bigger on a keel yacht. The most obvious thing is the rigging. The shrouds feel so massive when you put your hands around them compared to the tiny thin shrouds on the trailer sailer which by the way still has an absolutely massively long (but thin) mast bigger than any other trailer sailer I have ever come across at 10.75 m off its deck step.

It's going to need to be less maintenance if it's 2200 km away. One nice thing is that when it goes in the water you know that there are no barnacles or slime on it slowing you down. The 38 was cleaned today but won't stay that way long and will require slipping within three months at a yard where you're not even allowed to watch much less do any work yourself.

julesmoto said..

BeamReach said..
Yes, you can not replicate the strength and solidness of a keel yacht. My mate, who is not a sailer regularly says a trailer sailer would be a lot less maintenance.
Plus a keel boat can be an offshore cruiser and not with a trailer sailer, unless you own a Imexus 28 and do the real hard getting there, by road.
Cheers

Yes everything is disproportionately bigger on a keel yacht. The most obvious thing is the rigging. The shrouds feel so massive when you put your hands around them compared to the tiny thin shrouds on the trailer sailer which by the way still has an absolutely massively long (but thin) mast bigger than any other trailer sailer I have ever come across at 10.75 m off its deck step.

It's going to need to be less maintenance if it's 2200 km away. One nice thing is that when it goes in the water you know that there are no barnacles or slime on it slowing you down. The 38 was cleaned today but won't stay that way long and will require slipping within three months at a yard where you're not even allowed to watch much less do any work yourself.

Talking about rigging as someone who has gone from keel boats to a ts the one thing I am now very aware of is rigging tension . When I purchased the
ts the owner showed me how to raise and lower the mast with the shrouds intact. This was very convenient until you were hard on and the leeward shrouds were flapping all over the place with resultant trim issues . I now use a loos to get the tensions right and even though mast is left up I regularly check. I'm not too sure about a ts being a lot less maintenance . The ts has a drop or swing keel ( wear) ,a trailer to be regularly serviced if doing a lot of travelling and even though the items are smaller and cheaper they still require servicing , cleaning ,replacing etc. Actually I reckon there's more to be done

I replaced the beaten up Yanmar control panel (Yanmar wanted about $2500 or more to replace) with a much cheaper one from Vetus which looks better to my eye. It took a bit of decoding of wiring diagrams, made more complicated by the fact that the J-Boat uses US coding instead of standard Yanmar coding, but the engine is now stopping, starting and charging happily and the rest of the job looks fairly simple. It seems to be charging better too, which is odd.

I've just confirmed that D'Albora in Port Stephens still allow you to work on your boat on the hardstand, if you do the simple BIA safety card course. I've been there twice and found the management and staff to be cooperative and helpful. The only real downside is that you can only be in the yard during trading hours so can't sleep on your boat, but given the shortage of marinas in Sydney that allow you to work on your boat it could be useful to some. There's plenty of caravan parks and other accommodation nearby.

Also had a nice swim to clean the bottom and a quick topside clean in perfect weather on beautiful Port Stephens.

Turned my attention to the fit out, nice to find minimal rust when I pulled the chain locker out. Anyone hazard a guess at the purpose of the lug with a bolt in it under the Sampson post, in the inside of the stem ?

That or somewhere to secure the end of the chain would be the obvious, part of me thought it may have been a vent for when the lead was poured in the keel, now I'm thinking it might be a good place to pour some fish oil or the like into the keel

Not today, but over the last couple of weeks I fitted a new engine control panel to the Yanmar. Yanmar want a fortune for a new panel and I'm not nuts about the quality, so I ended up with a Vetus and a re-wiring job to adapt the Vetus loom to the Yanmar loom. She fired up and stopped first go, which was a relief, and saved a couple of grand.

Last weekend we came back through the passage north of Soldier's Point, Port Stephens, into the teeth of a damn big westerly with a gale warning out. At 36ft and 5 tonnes our boat is a bit underpowered by modern standards with a 20hp and I'm not convinced about the Kiwiprop she has, but because one of the dogs isn't mad about heeling we motored. Towing the big dinghy and with a bit of dirt on the hull we were making very slow progress so we said stuff this, went back under the lee of Soldiers Point and hoisted the triple reef main and turned off the donk. It was more than enough at times, but the boat went much better upwind under sail than under motor which I did like; it just reinforces that she's a sailing boat rather than a motorboat with a stick. The handling was impeccable, with never a hint of a missed tack when short tacking through the island passage into the teeth of the wind and heavy chop, despite dragging the RIB behind. Once again I was very happy to have the simple short-overlap fractional rig with Harkan roller cars on the main and a boom bag; reefing is incredibly easy.

Some sewing jobs starting to accumulate so set up the "loft" to get them underwater

Resealed a couple more deck fittings, working my way around the boat, its 16 years old and the sika is starting to fail so just going to do them all with butyl.

The engine has had a small seawater leak near the mixing elbow, last time I replaced the impeller there were missing blades, so I decided to remove the heat exchanger and service the entire system. Haven't had any heating/cooling issues as yet but found the following

Heavily calcified outlet to the mixing elbow down to about half its internal diameter
Exhaust hose from mixing elbow to lift muffler is stuffed, split inside needs replacing
Lift muffler need re-fibreglassing where exhaust hose mounts on it, has gone brittle and cracked with the heat
Most of the hose clamps are shot and on the verge of failure all will need replacing
Engine hoses are shot and need replacing
Sea water hose 1/8 bsp brass connection from engine seawater to PSS shaft seal failed and snapped off when I tried to remove the hose, this goes to the outboard side of the seal and has the potential to fill the boat (very slowly) if it snapped and was not notice so a good thing it snapped now when I was across it

Still yet to get the heat exchanger out of the manifold as I didn't trust my cheap allen keys so left over night to soak in some liquid spanner and purchased a quality impact allen key today to the remove bolts. I expect it to be heavily calcified as well

Didn't get any pics but I will and post later as I re assemble it all.

For a system that was operational it sure has a lot of items close to failure, glad I decided to go over the whole system.

Two things done today both for my yacht rather than to my yacht. I completed my portable casing of a secondhand Katadyn Power Survivor in a cheap pelican style copy box from supercheap auto and ordered an expensive 8.5 meter by 3 meter pontoon jetty which is supposed to be able to handle my yacht/powersailer being driven up into it out of the water. These new Australian made modular pontoon jetties are rated to carry up to 4 ton apparently unlike my current Chinese built one rated to 2 ton which has my hobie adventure island on it. We have purchased a second very cheap waterfront home with its own boat ramp and small jetty here in our remote unknown corner of SA. This one is single level and on close to three times the usable block area of our current two storey home with upstairs kitchen and features a drive in forwards and turn up around the back yard and back down its boat ramp to launch. Having done this you can then drive out forwards down the narrow driveway beside the house. The downside is our new home despite its huge waterfrontage is that it's on the end of a peninsula and much more exposed to the winds and wave action which means mooring against its jetty could see the boat thrown against this in some conditions. The concept of using the unusually huge outboard on my yacht to drive it up out of the water and onto a pontoon as is often seen with jet skis is attractive in stopping this potential source of damage and also stopping growth on my yacht in the water for longer periods as it isn't antifouled.
Despite careful confirmation with the manufacturer I remain cautious about the likely success of this project but as the unit isn't tremendously more expensive than buying another of the Chinese built ones I feel it was worth the gamble.

Started the process of freeing up the centre-board on my fixer-upper RL34. The rebar/concrete ballast under the floor has naturally started to rust and expand, squeezing the fiberglass centreboard trunk. Now i've just got to cut/crowbar out the solid lump of ballast around the centreboard trunk without making to much of a mess. Site won't let me post photo's yet, will do when I can.

Not exactly today, but I have been putting together a water maker over the past weeks.

It has an automatic 12v flush system which is used after making water or once a week via a timer.



I used some parts I had as spares including a 40psi water pump, which had burnt out the switch, as the boost pump.



I used a fan on the boost pump to keep it cool. No low pressure by-pass here yet.



This was the most expensive outlay, at $934, for the membrane & housing.



The rear of the panel - not the prettiest but compact.



Membrane assembled, ready to go in.



The membrane & the Karcher K2 high pressure pump mounted under a storage compartment behind the washing machine.



The boost pump, with the low pressure by-pass mounted (pic is upside down). I added the low pressure by-pass to keep the boost pump pressure down to 5 - 10psi to lessen the load/overheating down to a bare minimum.



This is the brine overflow with the HP needle valve wide open with the HP pump at 200psi not making any water.



This is the Reverse Osmosis output before going into the tanks after closing the HP needle valve to take the pressure up so as to push the raw water through the membrane.



Producing water with a TDS of 140ppm (500ppm is drinkable) @ 75 litres per hour while working at 800psi.



My schematic




I could have done this a bit cheaper, but I went with using the John Guest fittings & pipe for neatness but all up a tad over $2000 which is a lot cheaper than any you can buy??

If I find that I want more than 75 lph it's easy enough to add another membrane to this system!!

I usually run it off the inverter but if the batteries are down, I'll use the genny.

It's also been a lot of fun & kept my brain active while researching & building this!!

SeanTsv said..
Lazzz,
I have a similar set up with a SaltWater Pro. I was wondering how you set up your raw water feed. My system has a 12v 50 amp high pressure pump drive run from the starter battery due to cable size. I only use the watermaker with the engine running and under weigh. No gen set. I have a battery monitor just on this battery as well.
I set up my raw water feed with a suction pipe tied to the back stay and sitting a metre under the surface. It kept drawing air pockets which then ended up in the membrane and HP pump system.

My RW feed comes off the intake for the heads etc through a few filters - separate from the engine feed. Nobody is allowed to have a crap while I'm making water, although there is still probably enough to do both - I'll test it soon!!

What about if you try an elbow on the end of the suction pipe with the opening facing forward to eliminate getting air in, or even cutting the end of the pipe at an angle??
Or use a "12V Washdown Pump Kit 20L/MIN 70PSI High Pressure Wash-Down Deck Caravan Boat"
www.batterymate.com.au/products/12v-washdown-pump-kit-20l-min-70psi-high-pressure-wash-down-deck-caravan-boat?_pos=1&_sid=1b9d77190&_ss=r

You could use it for a deck wash as well. I have one for my house fresh water with a pressure reducer thingy for the shower etc but full 70psi pressure for the water maker flushing & deck wash.

Thanks for the tip about Sodium Metabisulfite from Big W - I got some online.